Agnosticism – Philosophical Definition

Agnosticism is the thesis that, contrary to what atheists and theists alike assume, it is either in practice or in principle imposible to know if or not God exists. In various forms, agnosticism recurs throughout the history of philosophy. For example, Huxley has coined the term.

Their position was occasioned partly as a result of philosophical questioning, inspired bu Hume and Kant, the the very possibility of human knowledge of realms transcending possible experience. But during the same period, uncritical acceptance of the Bible as divine self-revelation was also under pressure from scientific and historical research. Faith may, however, be possiblewhere knowledge strictly so-called is not, and hence there is a sense in which it is logically possible, even if psychologically difficult, to be both a philosophical agnostic and a religious believer.

Traditionnal agnosticism, which regards the statement that God exists as unverifiable but nonetheless meaningful, was rejected by logical positivists, who held that if unverifiable it is ipso facto meaningless.

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